Human Service Organizations in the Disaster Context

Kenneth A. Loparo, Kate van Heugten

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137389602
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137387424
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Human Service Organizations in the Disaster Context explores the efforts of human service practitioners to support communities facing the impacts of large-scale hazardous events. Using the stories of frontline workers and managers who lived through devastating earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, and drawing on international research and sociological theory, van Heugten astutely analyses the challenges and opportunities that arise. In the immediate aftermath of disasters, there is often a surge in altruism giving rise to hope for improved social cohesion. This hope wanes when negative impacts fall unequally on people living in poverty and other vulnerable populations. Political, financial, and professional interest groups vie for power and local citizens' voices are frequently overruled. Human service workers act as boundary spanners, networking between organizations to draw attention to the concerns of vulnerable people, and to advocate for human rights and social justice.

1. Introduction: Human Service Organizations and Disasters

Disasters affect human societies at a profound level. Whether “natural” or more clearly anthropogenic (human-caused), disasters tend to involve a sudden event and a long-lasting devastating aftermath that interferes with the everyday functioning of large groups of people. Large environmental disasters frequently disrupt access to basic resources and utilities, such as water and food supplies, power networks, wastewater systems, roading (transport), communication technologies, and housing. The efforts of workers from civil defense, police, fire brigade, armed forces, urban search and rescue teams, Red Cross and Red Crescent, and other local and international emergency services are very visible following disasters.

Disasters also place extreme pressure on a wide range of statutory and nongovernment human service organizations that deliver assistance in the health, welfare, justice, and education sectors. In the emergency response and recovery phases of disasters, local human service organizations provide support to large numbers of vulnerable people with complex needs. This less visible, but not less important, work continues despite damage to the organizations’ buildings, loss of equipment, and problems with obtaining information. Managers, frontline workers, and volunteers continue to report to work, even while they themselves are personally dealing with the effects of the disaster.

Although disasters are extremely disruptive, they also give rise to new forms of collective expression, and it is common for pro-social attitudes and behaviors to increase in affected communities, at least in the short to intermediate term. There is potential to harness this shift and to build on it to achieve a more equitable distribution of resources and well-being. Human service workers are strongly motivated to contribute to such an outcome. Achieving this, however, requires an in-depth critical analysis of systems and contexts (Pyles 2011) and a reversal of the global privileging of markets over people. What typically happens, after a disaster’s immediate emergency phase, is that some people are left more vulnerable, whereas others profit from the disaster’s consequences.

Decades of social research has led to a growing understanding that preventing such severely imbalanced outcomes requires interventions at community and policy levels. Yet most human service workers continue to focus their efforts at a microlevel, assisting individuals and families to meet short-term welfare needs or to overcome psychological trauma. This is in large part due to policies and funding decisions made at a governmental level, outside the disaster-affected region, to target those particular issues. Provoked by the immediacy of a crisis, human service organizations often make decisions under urgency, prompted by available emergency funding. When, consequently, they adopt a micro, depoliticized approach to postdisaster work, the potential long-term consequences can include poorly targeted services, neglect of traditional service user groups, and entrenchment of antiwelfare neoliberal policies. In the wake of disasters, badly managed changes in organizational missions can also lead to guilt, cynicism, and disengagement among human service staff, whose attachment to work usually revolves around human rights and humanitarian values (van Heugten 2011b).

Concepts such as community resilience and social capital have become embedded in disaster management discourses, and appear to be enthusiastically endorsed by governments (Allen 2013). This enthusiasm does not, however, translate into consistent long-term resourcing of community work initiatives. Human service organizations that lobby for more macrolevel changes aimed at benefitting disenfranchised people can find themselves disadvantaged in relation to funding opportunities. All too quickly, an initial surge in hope—that a disaster might give rise to more collaborative approaches to decision making and more fairly distributed well-being—turns into disappointment at the seeming impossibility of achieving real and lasting humanitarian improvements. When that happens, communities lose the opportunity to achieve positive outcomes from a crisis.

This book addresses students, educators, frontline workers, managers, and policymakers. It is relevant to people with a role in disaster management and to researchers with an interest in the organization of welfare and of work. Its focus is on how human service workers and organizations are affected by disasters, how they can respond adaptively in contexts of uncertainty, and how they might enhance community recovery. To explore this, I draw on findings from a qualitative study of the aftermath of the Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 and specifically focus on the impacts on human service organizations and workers in the city of Christchurch.

In this chapter, I introduce the Canterbury earthquakes and explain aspects of the research process. To unravel how disasters affect human services, it is necessary to look beyond the stories of workers in particular organizations and consider networks of organizations, systems of funding, and sociopolitical contexts as they evolve over time, both locally and globally (Karger, Owen, and van de Graaff 2012; Nickel and Eikenberry 2007; Pyles 2011; Zakour 2008; Zakour and Gillespie 1998).

I go on to define some important key concepts, such as disasters and human services, and consider what the word “community” might mean. I briefly touch on debates about resilience, vulnerability, and social capital, because these concepts have entered popular discourse to such an extent that it is difficult to start a discussion without examining how they will be approached here. I also briefly discuss the relevance of workplace stress theories, which are not frequently included in disaster literature. The chapter concludes with an overview of the structure of the remainder of the book.

THE CANTERBURY EARTHQUAKES OF 2010 AND 2011

Events such as the 2001 destruction of the twin towers in New York City, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the East Asian tsunami of 2004, and the tsunami off the coast of Japan in 2011 are widely known and remembered internationally. By contrast, fewer people probably recall the Canterbury earthquakes of September 4, 2010, and February 22, 2011, or realize their ongoing consequences. That the world media reported each of these New Zealand events over several days and continued to post updates over months and years was probably due to our Anglo-Saxon economic and political connections.

No one died as a direct result of the Canterbury earthquake of September 4, 2010, despite it measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. When it struck at 4:35 a.m., most people were in bed asleep. By contrast, 185 people lost their lives in the February 22, 2011, earthquake, which struck at 12:51 P.M. Most died in the collapse of two multistory commercial buildings in the center of the city, close to the epicenter of the 6.3 magnitude earthquake. Many more people were injured: 6,659 within the first 24 hours. Although most injuries were minor, some people suffered life-changing spinal fractures, head injuries, and loss of limbs (Al-Shaqsi et al. 2013; Ardagh et al. 2012). Many buildings were irreparably damaged, including industrial and commercial buildings and over 100,000 homes (Provost 2012). There was widespread disruption to lifeline utilities, including power, water, sewerage, and transportation systems. Although Canterbury’s natural disaster resulted in fewer deaths than many other recent disasters, it directly affected over 10 percent of the New Zealand population of 4.4 million people. Estimates of damage costs vary, but amounted to at least 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), with estimates of rebuilding costs rising above NZ$30 billion (Parker and Steenkamp 2012).

Prior to the earthquakes, Christchurch was arguably the second largest city in New Zealand, with a population estimated at 386,100 in 2008, just ahead of the capital city of Wellington’s 386,000 and growing slightly faster (Statistics New Zealand 2012). Christchurch city’s population reduced over two years following the February 2011 earthquake, but began to rise again by 2013 (Statistics New Zealand 2013). For most Christchurch citizens, the events remain vivid, and we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the two large earthquakes struck. Yet we soon discovered that people who were not physically present and hence did not experience adrenalin surges, nor were gripped by fear that their family or friends might be hurt, could not really “get it.” Watching images on YouTube, being updated on Facebook about the thousands of geological aftershocks, or receiving quickly relayed text messages did not enable “outsiders” to experience what it was like to walk in our shoes. On the other hand, residents who left town to live elsewhere might find they were unable to escape the earthquake’s unsettling effects. A research participant sent a postscript (August 2013):

Frankly, I am still fairly tuned for earthquakes. I get a fright if I feel a bit of a tremble even if it is not caused by tectonic movements, only by a lorry going by. :) I guess I am going to remain more alert.

Since our own disaster experience, we more acutely notice the frequency of major community catastrophes. We experience a keener distress at media images of distant events, because we empathize with people’s bewilderment and loss. We now understand that the images appearing on our screens depict only the public beginnings of a much longer, more complex, and often difficult privately borne journey. We believe others could learn from our experiences, but apprehend a generally apathetic response.

This response should not surprise us. Prior to September 2010, I had taught about natural and human-caused disasters for a number of years. Despite that, I had no intention to stock water and tinned food, and regarded with some bemusement the friends who followed civil defense instructions to do so. An immigrant from continental Europe, I was more alert to the ravages of wars, and grateful to live in a country which, as my 13-year-old son noted, “is of little strategic interest” and hence less likely to be invaded. Though New Zealand has been dubbed “the shaky isles,” most major earthquakes occur outside urban areas. The general populace did not expect one to occur in Christchurch, but further north, in Wellington. There are no active volcanoes nearby, and tornadoes also occur further north. Thus, it seemed that unless one was an adventure tourist, disasters were unlikely to befall one on the Canterbury Plains. This was a common perception nationally. One earthquake-phobic research participant had relocated to Christchurch prior to the earthquakes, identifying it as a safe location; another had stored a fully stocked emergency kit out of reach after moving to the city, considering it an unnecessary encumbrance.

International research suggests that Christchurch residents are not alone in this capacity to dissociate from the reality of possible calamities. Berkes (2007) pointed out that community alertness after a hazardous event lasts about 20 years and then decays. This poses problems in terms of learning and predisaster planning. There is less interest in the lessons of disasters than one might expect, not only among citizens but also within organizations, although organizations with responsibilities for vulnerable people appear to invest more effort in preparedness (Chikoto, Sadiq, and Fordyce 2013). At individual and organizational levels, there is a degree of skepticism about the possibility of planning for disasters when these occur relatively rarely in any particular location and vary in type.

Although Christchurch residents may now be more conscious of risk, many have become less diligent over time. They have stopped refreshing their stocks of drinking water, have raided their survival kits of chocolate and left them un-replenished, and ignore that batteries may have lost their charge. People are more alert to the fragility and uncertainty of their existence, but this does not necessarily impel them to reframe their lives around the concept that environmental risk is ever-present. Unless, of course, they are among those residents who continue to live in damaged surroundings or have been affected by trauma to the extent that they suffer hypervigilance.

Lack of control is still a dominant experience, but located less in environmental events than in human interactions and economic conditions. By 2014, earthquake-related poverty had become a significant issue, along with insecure housing, due to shortages of rental accommodation, unresolved insurance claims, and rebuilding-related difficulties. The long-drawn-out nature of the recovery, and the complexity of local and national decision making, into which we appear to have little input, have affected all who have remained in Christchurch.

THE RESEARCH

When the first major earthquake struck Canterbury in September 2010, I was writing a book on workplace stress in the human services (van Heugten 2011b). Chapter 5 of that book addressed the impacts of working with trauma, and now naturally opened with the experiences of those living in Christchurch. Following the February 2011 earthquake, my publishers asked whether I wanted to update the chapter, but the events seemed too close for reflection and I decided merely to mention the devastation in an author’s note. Many academics subsequently commenced earthquake-related research, and I was initially resistant to embarking on a study. Yet the relevance of local events and the lack of holistic attention to impacts on human services in the wider literature were undeniable. I asked practitioners for their thoughts on the need for research into the challenges faced by the sector, and they gave a strongly positive response.

I sought and gained ethics approval from the University of Canterbury Human Ethics Committee to embark on an exploratory qualitative study. I called for participants through the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers (ANZASW); members of the association also passed the invitation on to other potential participants. The starting place for the research was a series of unstructured research interviews, conducted with 43 human service workers, including frontline workers (28) and managers (15). I undertook these in and around the city of Christchurch at the end of 2011. Workers categorized their employing organizations and their work as being in the fields of welfare, child protection, education and employment, health and mental health, criminal justice, psychological services, and community development. For some, recipients of services were specific vulnerable populations, such as frail older people, young offenders, or people suffering medical or psychological illnesses. In other cases, the need for particular resources defined clients’ eligibility for services, or work was located in spatially defined neighborhoods or in religious communities. Employing agencies included nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government, and quasi-government organizations. A small number of participants (two) provided human services in for-profit organizations.

Of the original 43 participants, 6 were men and 37 were women. Men were overrepresented among the managers. This gender imbalance was reflective of the human services workforce. Participants’ ages also reflected the aging demographic of the workforce, with just three aged 25–35, nine aged 36–45, and 31 over 45 years of age (ANZASW 2013; McPherson 2009). Almost all were tertiary qualified; about half had a social work qualification, and other qualifications included psychology, education, and human resource management. Twenty-nine participants specified their ethnicity as New Zealand European, six as Māori, one as New Zealand European/New Zealand Māori, and two as New Zealand Samoan. Three had immigrated from Anglophone countries and two from continental Europe. To protect participants’ anonymity, I have not named them or allocated pseudonyms and have omitted potentially identifying information.

Data included information from the unstructured interviews, which I opened with a simple request for participants to talk about the challenges and opportunities they or their organizations had encountered in their work. I emphasized that I was interested in any perspective, which might range from the personal to the organizational to the macropolitical level. Interviews evolved as themes began to emerge, and I inquired into those. In 2012 and 2013, all participants received the opportunity to read and correct their transcripts. Only a small number asked for minor corrections, but many more provided updates on their situations.

Other data sources included academic and gray (informally published) literature pertaining to the Canterbury earthquakes. During 2013 and 2014, I also undertook a small number of additional background interviews to test and discuss my emerging theories with stakeholder experts who had been in disaster coordinating or leadership roles. Their insights were of great value. To enable them to speak freely, and with their agreement, they remain anonymous. A visit to Brisbane, Australia, and the University of Queensland during October 2013 helped to place ideas within an international context.

I applied a methodology based on the principles of grounded theory. Grounded theory is an inductive approach to research that relies on exploratory data, typically gathered in unstructured or semistructured interviews, rather than on the testing of hypotheses derived from existing theories. Grounded theory analysis requires the researcher to exhaustively code information, and then to investigate the relationships between these open codes with a view to building explanatory theories (Glaser and Strauss 196...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.   Introduction: Human Service Organizations and Disasters
• 2.   Roles and Activities of Human Services in the Aftermath of Disasters
• 3.   Theories for Praxis
• 4.   The Canterbury Earthquakes
• 5.   The Canterbury Earthquakes and the Politics of Disasters
• 6.   Making Sense of Human Services in the Context of Community Disasters
• 7.   Values, Meaning Making, and Community Building
• 8.   Supporting the Human Services to Strengthen Communities
• References
• Index